In one breathtaking editorial, the Kansas City Star editors managed to insult the residents of Missouri, the residents of Mississippi, and every politically aware black person in America. Almost unique among their fellow Show-Me Staters–presuming any of them actually live in Missouri–the Star editors have actually taken the NAACP’s Missouri travel advisory seriously.

There is some logic to this. Both the NAACP and the Kansas City Star have abandoned their historic legacies to become shills for the Democratic Party. So when the marching orders come down to feign outrage over a sensible Missouri bill designed to limit bogus discrimination suits, the NAACP takes the ideological lead, and the Star follows.

The Star, in fact, one ups the NAACP in the hyperbole department. Indeed, comparing contemporary Missouri to Jim Crow Mississippi makes the Hitler-Trump comparisons seem downright sensible. This is not something a publication with pretensions of seriousness should do.

Apparently, Missouri has many racial sins to atone for beyond tort reform. Claim the editors,”the word Missouri these days evokes the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the slurs against black students at the University of Missouri and the recent death of Tory Sanders.”

As we now know, of course, Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson acted appropriately in shooting Brown and has had his career ruined because of the race-baiting hype that followed. We know too that the racial incidents at MU, if they actually happened, were trivial to the point of embarrassing. In both cases, the people of Missouri saw through the media hysteria surrounding these issues. The Sanders case is still being adjudicated. He died in a Southwest Missouri jail after a series of altercations, but to assume he was the victim of some racist plot is as paranoid and premature as to assume Wilson shot Brown because he was black.

Of course, the Star editors fully ignore the one reason the NAACP should issue a Missouri travel advisory. Year after year, the state leads the nation in black homicide deaths per capita. In fact, the Star home page on the day this editorial was published is filled with cautionary tales: woman shot to death at 37th and Woodland; killer sought in murder of two pre-teen cousins; man found slain on Cypress Avenue; man shot on Cleveland Avenue; female Tanzanian refugee with baby on her back held up at knife point.

Like the NAACP, the Star once actually labored to improve the world. Now its editors labor to prove their moral superiority, the world be damned.

Social Counter

The Sentinel is an independent 501(c)3 non-profit organization that holds government and mainstream media accountable for providing complete, accurate and unbiased information so that citizens can make their own informed decisions. We encourage readers to share story ideas by visiting the Get Involved page and hope you will consider supporting our work by visiting the Donate page.